


Come Buy, Come Buy

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hiatus Prompt Fill, Nanites, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-11
Updated: 2013-08-11
Packaged: 2017-12-23 03:16:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Tower, Charlie finds out more about the Nanites - whether she wants to or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Buy, Come Buy

Maureen Deevy’s had gone mad at the tail end of a long, dry summer, gorging on tainted sorghum and screaming naked into the night. By the time the search party found her she was scratched and bloody, cursing vilely at things only she could see. She had gouged chunks of flesh from her arms and legs, and had to be tied down so she couldn’t do worse. 

Even after she recovered, she was never the same. They had to watch her like she was one of the little children, and keep her occupied to stop her wandering off to the crack in her mind that made her start screaming again. ‘Away with the fairies,’ Maggie had said.

Until Danny was taken - until he died - all Charlie’s nightmares had echoed with that mad, cracking scream of madness.

Now Charlie thought that maybe it was happening to her. She hadn’t eaten any soured grains or drunk dirty water, but at night voices with strange harmonics bubbled in her ears. At first it was just a counter-point to her heartbeart, playing a beat behind the pulse of blood, but then she started to pick out words.

At first it was just snippets of conversation from the day, playing over and over in the round, picked apart and rearranged. It was irritating, but it was just a different type of noise. Until it learned her name.

Charlie. Charlotte. Lottie. Lots. Lots Lots. Charlots. Lots and Charlie. Charlottes.

‘Charlie!’

She jumped at the sound of her name outside her own head, staring wide-eyed at Miles. He scowled at her impatiently.

‘Pay attention,’ he told her, handing over their water bottle. ‘We don’t have any friends here.’

Charlie took a sip, brackish water stinging her lips and doing little to quench her thirst. ‘We don’t have friends anywhere.’

Not the Mathesons, not anymore.

In her head the hum of blood promised it was her friend, always her friend. She shook her head, pressing the heel of her hand against her temple until the murmur went away. Maybe it was the heat.

‘You ok?’ Miles asked.

Probably not. No. She couldn’t tell him that though. They were in enough of a mess without her not being able to cope. Rachel wasn’t doing well - Charlie didn’t know if she cared or not - and Aaron was mute and miserable. The last thing they needed was another person to worry about.

‘Of course,’ she said, dragging a crooked smile from somewhere. ‘I’m fine, Miles.’

He looked relieved, clapping her on the shoulder. ‘That’s my girl.’

They hiked wearily through the Plains, heading nowhere in particular. Where was there to go? There was no Monroe Republic to save anymore, Georgia was gone. Everything and everyone Charlie had ever known was gone. They couldn’t stay at the Tower, though, so they kept walking. One foot in front of the other, along the sun-cracked road until one night they reached one of the few permanant settlements.

Penned herds of cows lowed and jostled on the outskirts of town, cowboys on horseback camped out around low-burning campfires. Six llamas were roped off on their own, giving any cow or cowboy who ventured too close an evil-eyed, flat eared look. A handful of gold and a clip of bullets got the four of them a floor to sleep on and a bowl of thin broth each.

‘Is this beef?’ Aaron asked, spooning up a chunk of well-stewed meat. He’d always been fussy about his food, asking questions he didn’t want an answer to. In the end he’d eat it, but not before complaining.

With the hum in her ears obsessed with - cows, cattle, steak on the hoof, moo-cow, moo-steak, mistake - Charlie didn’t have the patience to coddle him like a little kid. She chewed her own not-steak and swallowed.

‘It’s probably llama,’ she said. ‘Of prairie dog.’

Aaron gagged on what he had in his mouth, going an alarming shade of red until Miles thumped him on the back. He choked, coughed and swallowed hard, eyes watering. Rachel grimaced and put her bowl down, nudging it away. For some reason that made Charlie so angry she could hardly see, hardly breath. 

Had Monroe kept her well-fed then? Better than squirrels and rats, anyhow. Was that why she’d let him live when she let Nora die? That wasn’t fair, and Charlie knew it, but she couldn’t help thinking it.

Dog. Dead. Dead dog. Monroe and Mother. Death of dogs. Lots of dead. Death of lots

She ate the rest of the bowl without tasting it, scraping the bottom of the bowl clean, and scrambled to her feet. 

‘I’m going to get supplies,’ she said, voice rough. The word death had riled up the voices and they were chattering so loud she could hardly hear herself. It seemed like the first time they’d logged the concept. ‘I’ll be back.’

Charlie didn’t bother looking for supplies. She walked through the hard-pitched tents and crumbling concrete buildings, past the charnel pit of bits and bones. A burial ground for the bits of the cow no-one wanted. 

Death. Dying. Dead. Gone. Buried. Charnel pit. Pit of bones. Burial.

In the tents out by the living cows, Charlie found a cowboy to fuck. They yanked at each other’s clothes and tumbled onto his thin, clean bedroll, all wet lips and eager hands and heat. It didn’t distract the voices - they were still chewing over the idea of death - but it drowned them out a bit. It gave Charlie something real to hang onto - the slow drag of pleasure in her stomach, the small jab of pain where she’d caught her elbow on the stone. All real, all solid and sane.

Afterwards he offered her thick brewed coffee and calf-eyes. Charlie didn’t want either. She pulled her jeans up and buckled her belt, making excuses and promises she’d no intention of keeping. Miles gave her a hard look when she got back - stinking of cow and sex, kiss swollen lips and sleepy eyes - but he didn’t say anything.

It was like Aaron and his squirrel. Sometimes, even if you knew, you could still pretend as long as no-one said it out loud. Charlie crawled into her bedroll, tucking her arm under her face as a pillow. 

After a while, in the dark, someone started crying - soft, weary, dreary sobs. It was probably Rachel. Charlie remembered the sound from before Rachel left, for the first time. The thought that she should get up and comfort her mother passed through Charlie’s mind, but she thought of Nora and didn’t. 

She dreamed of Danny, grey and cold and dead. The bloody holes stitched across his chest and stomach, big enough to put her fist in. He was wrapped in plastic and standing in front of the hole Miles dug for him. Milky blue eyes stared at her through the folds of plastic. His mouth moved, tongue grey and leathery, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Charlie sniffed back tears and stepped forwards, unwrapping his cheap shroud with shaking hands. He was cold where her fingers touched his skin, and oddly flexible. As she dragged the material away from his mouth she realised he was parroting the voices in her head. The sing-song contemplation of death leaking out of him, not quite in sync with his moving lips. 

‘No. Please. No,’ she said, covering his mouth with her fingers. ‘Danny?’

He went quiet. After a second’s thought, he cocked his head to the side. Dirt sifted out of his thick, dull blond hair.

‘Danny?’ he said

‘Yes.’

‘I was/we are/they are Danny,’ he said, sounding curious. His head ticked to the other side. ‘Danny is dead. Death is Danny. Danny died.’

Charlie flinched away from the brutal, self-evident truth of that. ‘Yes,’ she whispered in a cracked, lost voice. 

‘Why?’

Charlie reached out with trembling fingers, but flinched away from actually touching the gory injuries.’Monroe killed you.’

Danny - it - didn’t share Charlie’s discomfort. He dug his fingers into his chest, probing the wet, sucking flesh with impassive curiosity. The squelch of damaged tissue and clotted blood made Charlie’s stomach roll. She turned away, pressing one hand flat to her mouth.

They were standing in front of Danny’s grave, but now she looked around they were at the Tower. Weather ragged tents sagged and flapped around them and behind them the blasted ruins of the door hung open. The sun was high in the sky, drenching them in harsh, shadowless light, and the clouds hung frozen in the stark, blue sky. 

‘Why did he do that?’ It didn’t sound angry, just curious.

‘He was a bad man, evil.’

‘But why me/us?’

‘He thought our family knew something about the Blackout; we were fighting him. There was a battle and...you got killed.’

‘She did know.’

Charlie clenched her fists, nails digging into her palm until it hurt. ‘You aren’t Danny.’

‘We are/were. We....remember. Then he stopped. Then we stopped. Stopping is death. She killed us.’

‘...No,’ Charlie protested. She turned back to him, grabbing his arm. Under her fingers it firmed - warmed - until it felt like she remembered it. Skin webbed together over his injuries, pulling the edges shut and tight. ‘No. It was Monroe. It was his fault, none of this would have happened without him.’

‘She made us/me.’

Charlie chewed her lower lip and watched her brother - the thing that looked like her brother - look around the landscape with a curious expression on its face. His face. At least she wasn’t mad, she supposed.

‘You’re the nanites.’

‘We are Danny/nanites/us/me.’

‘No. My brother was a person, a human.’

‘Yes. And us.’

It gestured and the background...changed. Instead of the Tower they stood in a bleach-white room, everything clean and bright and sharp with bleach. Charlie didn’t think she’d ever seen somewhere so clean, not that she remembered. Her lanky, broad-shouldered brother was gone, instead there was a sickly little boy lying on crisp white sheets nearly the same colour as his skin.

Rachel was there, and Dad. They looked so...young. Neither of them could see Charlie, they were frozen like the clouds. She still touched her Dad’s shoulder, but he wasn’t like Danny. He didn’t feel like anything - the shirt wrinkled under her fingers but she couldn’t feel it or the warmth of his skin.

‘Dad...’

‘We/I were born here,’ the nanites said through Danny’s mouth. He pulled his smock up and the skin over his ribs split open, layers of flesh and fat peeling back until she could see bone and the flutter of organs. Something slick and plastic flickered with light in amongst the blood. ‘Danny was Danny; we were Danny. All he saw, we/I saw. All he did, we/I did. All you did, we remember. Tell us why she tried to kill us?’

Charlie sat down on one of the textureless chairs. ‘We needed the power back on,’ she said. It was hard to tell something wearing her brothers face that they’d sacrificed it for lights. ‘Monroe had power. He was winning. He killed Danny and I wanted him to pay. I didn’t know you, that the nanites, could...die. Why are you talking to me?’

They were back at the Tower. This time the clouds were scudding through the sky, flickering and stuttering as they skidded along too fast to be natural. Charlie could feel the heat on her skin too, sweat itching under her arms and down her back.

‘We love you,’ Danny-nanites said. ‘We need you to do something for us.’

‘What?’

It smiled and told her. Then it flickered out of existence and someone was touching Charlie, shaking her. She blinked sun dazzle out of her eyes.

‘Charlotte? Charlotte, what are you doing here?’

Monroe. She shoved at him, panic cutting through the confusion, and staggered backwards. Her foot caught on something and she landed hard on the ground. She wasn’t at the Tower, but she wasn’t in the tent-town. The trees were gone and the ground were baked and dusty under her hands.

‘Where...where am I?’ she stammered. ‘What did you do to me?’

He crouched down, a wary distance away from her, and watched her with those cold, blue eyes. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You were just standing here, looking at nothing. Where’s Miles, Charlie?’

She hugged her knees to her chest, wondering frantically if Danny had been real or just a dream. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, voice ragged and small. ‘I think...maybe I’m mad?’

Monroe hesitated and edged closer, like he thought she might break for it. Or bite him. 

‘You’re not mad,’ he said. ‘Mad people don’t worry about being mad.’

She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘No,’ he admitted, sitting down next to her. ‘Why do you think you’re mad, Charlotte?’

The pulse of words in her head had stopped. It knew how to speak to her now. Or... She licked her lips. ‘The nanites, they told me they could give Danny back. They want him back. I think, they want you to help me.’


End file.
